That dude

Final exam tomorrow for my contract law class. The ENTIRE grade comes from the one exam so I'm hoping that I don't mess up too badly and will put in another 7 hours this evening studying. Still, I think I'm going to give up on the 4.0 this mini since I know that I'll be lucky to get an A- in my management communication class, and figure that a classmate could make better use of any merit money awarded at the end of the summer.

In other news, given that I'll need to renew my lease in the next 10 days, I decided to do a quick online house search to see if anything looked interesting and noticed that most houses were being listed at 2x their property tax assessed values. Ugh... I guess low interest rates are encouraging folks to overspend on houses.

Still, given how many of the folks who are listing their homes for those insane numbers have appealed their property tax increases, I was kinda considering lobbying the city to pass legislation that would force anyone who is contesting their assessed property value to sell their home for 25% above the assessed value to anyone who offered. It would probably get most folks to pay their fair share (instead of me having to pay more flat taxes) and could raise a buttload of extra revenue for the city by assessing at real values.

Too bad there isn't enough in-town new house building to get the market back into whack. I guess I'll just have to wait until everyones ARMs shoot up in another year and folks start defaulting on mortgages to bring the market back to reasonable levels. I'm still unsure how long I want to stay in the city so postponing a buy right now might not be a bad idea. Given that my rent is going up to $685/month for my 600sqft apartment with an indoor parking space in a prime location, I'm probably better off just renting and not having to worry about property taxes and maintenance.

Long term, I'll have to think more about getting a house and might be better off just finding a nice plot of land and building something nice.